Abandoned by user

I'm a bit of an outlier with this one here on BL - most of the ratings are quite a bit higher than this one.

I really like Slaughter's Will Trent series, which features a GBI (Georgia Bureau of Investigations) detective who is dyslexic and functionally illiterate. This is actually fairly implausible as well - if there is one thing that is absolutely required for detectives, it's competent reading skills. Nonetheless, that bothers me very little in that series because the characters are so engaging.

Pretty Girls is a Slaughter stand-alone - the third that I've read. It is very engaging. In fact, you can use any of those silly review words to describe it: compulsively readable; propulsive action; blah blah blah.

Unfortunately, it is so violent that it is almost unreadable. If you think back to the sexual violence in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo series, that's what we're talking about here. This is a deal breaker for a lot of people, and I'm not kidding when I say it is violent. Violence really isn't a deal breaker for me, but this book was at the leading edge of what I can even read. On a scale of 1 to 10, the level of sexual violence is this book is 1,532,710. It's that violent.

In addition, though, the real problem that I had with the book was that it is utterly implausible. I have no problem with conspiracies that verge on preposterous, but this one, nope. It strained credulity beyond the breaking point.

I read it in about 3 hours - and it's an over 500 page book - so that tells you that it is gripping. But I didn't really enjoy the process of being gripped.